And yet once again, I am proved correct. It appears that all our electronic health information is now to be distributed among 35 different government agencies to included FTC, FCC, DOJ, DOE, USDA, OCR…. The list of offices that have no justifiable right to it are on this list…. Office for Civil Rights? Federal Communications Commi-mission? Federal Trade Commission? Seriously? Direct access to our Electronic Health Record.

For those of you who do not know:
EHR = Electronic Health Record which is the actual patient notes that the provider writes. Your diagnosis, treatment, chief complaints, all that private information about you that you might not even tell your significant other about. That is what is kept there.
EMR = Electronic Medical Record which is the demographics, billing, medical trending information for use in doing reports and billing type functions. Information like when you were seen, how often, your insurance, the ICD codes billed, etc…..

So the government already has access by law (HIPAA) to all the EMR stuff. That was why they did the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Now they are getting the rest of the information that you thought was privileged and confidential.

Just because you think someone is out to get you doesn’t mean that you are wrong.

Along with the primary goal of expanding the availability of health insurance, the Affordable Care Act aims to make the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) universal. This plan actually began with the 2009 stimulus (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), which included the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Doctors and other health providers have been offered incentives to convert patient information and health histories to a compatible and transferable electronic format, and as of June 2014, 75 percent of eligible doctors and 92 percent of eligible hospitals had received payments under the program.

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to “advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.” The plan is illustrated with the following graphic:

Each step of the plan includes three-year and six-year goals, and the various goals, depending on their focus, require the involvement of department and agencies as disparate as the Department of Defense, the Federal Trade Commission, and NASA, in addition to the expected participation of entities such as HHS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service. The report includes a comprehensive list of all departments and agencies involved:

While Electronic Health Records (EHR) are the most visible example of the type of information the plan discusses, other technologies include “mobile and telehealth technology, cloud-based services,

medical devices, and remote monitoring devices, assistive technologies, and sensors.” The plan stresses the importance of government in developing these technologies given its roles to “provide direct care and health insurance, protect public health, fund health and human services for certain populations, invest in infrastructure, develop and implement policies and regulations, and advance groundbreaking research.”

Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015.

Add to this all the proliferation of license plate readers that are recording when and where you have been, the growing number of drones with cameras, and all of the spying by the NSA and it is a Brave New World indeed. Though I have nothing to hide and have always been law abiding, all this creeps me out to no end. We should have a right to privacy. If you look at how NY has started using info from mental health providers to now seize guns without any due process, you know that the medical info will increasingly be used against the people rather than to help people. I have never felt the need for counseling of any sort but if I ever do feel I need it, I won’t go because I have to assume,it will eventually be used against me in some manner. We’re getting to the point where being politically incorrect is a defacto crime, and just as the IRS goes after the politically incorrect, so won’t other agencies as they have more and more info on you to draw upon in order to punish you.

One thing to take comfort in, is that many providers are being very careful how they code someone. They are looking for the most benign diagnosis possible to protect people from this intrusion. They are fearful that patients will not be honest about symptoms, etc. if they fear the government will be looking over the Dr.’s shoulder.

The bad news is that many Dr.’s are also on board with this. So you will need to be very selective about who choose as a Dr. If you start to hear questions about what you own, or what your political or religous affiliations are, be very afraid.

Good point Roadracer. I recently switched to a new primary physician when my old one was moving away. I had an annual physical as part of a meet and greet sort of thing to get established as a patient and was pleased that he didn’t ask me any inappropriate questions. He happened to be the only primary care physician in the area taking new patients so its not like I had much choice as to where to go, and so I was pleased to come away liking him.

Guy when I when this week because of my Urinary Tract Infection the doctor there had a printout of my health history with everything on it. I do not know how they had it all since this information was at many doctors not just from one.

Its probably irrelevent to The hospital union but the cost of the record keeping will equal the cost of the care itself. I still haven’t figured out who they think is going to pay for this absurdity. Mexican immigrants? Chinese? Aliens from Alpha Centauri?

The record keeping isn’t the issue. It is the auditing, reporting, and data mining that will raise the costs. Those costs (as have already been seen since enforcement of HIPAA) are passed along to the few people who actually pay for health insurance. Those without and don’t pay, those on government programs, and “charity” programs do nothing but drive up costs to everyone else. I work in the healthcare industry (management) and have a graduated degree (MBA) in healthcare administration. Trust me when I say that anyone who gets to actually see the healthcare costs per patient before 1996 and the costs after 2000 when HIPAA started driving prices and isn’t clouded by a political agenda has to agree that HIPAA and HITECH were bad laws. It is in black and white. These laws DID NOT set security for patient health records. They OPENED UP access to everyone but the patient……

This does nothing but bypass the patient health record security regulations so that the government can do as they please. Considering this administration is 100% about turning our citizens into subjects, you don’t have to work at the Jiffy Lube to know that there are some personal agendas getting ready to be forced upon us. For instance: This makes it where anyone EVER saying that they feel depressed can be given a mental health ICD code and LEOs can show up at your doorstep to take you guns…. You can be denied life insurance based upon “clerical errors” that no one will fix…… Be denied a government job because you have ED….. Whatever.

As individuals interested in our privacy, we do have choices. We can just say no to the state-run medicine system. (I live in Canada and I have been avoiding using the system for over seven years. My health and the health of my family, has never been better.)

From personal experience, doctors can be really bad for one’s health. I’m very happy to have a doctor deal with trauma such as setting a bone, or dealing with an acute condition… but doctors do a poor job at dealing with chronic conditions. Doctors are confined to the standard of care, even when these standards don’t work. Even though our society worships the medicine profession, doctors often miss diagnosed conditions. Doctors overuse what seems to be their one tool, medications, which can have negative outcomes. These doctor mistakes are formally called iatrogenic causes. It’s hard to get statistics about Iatrogenesis but some say it’s as high as the third cause of death:

I think part of prepping is learning how to take charge of our own mental and physical health and just saying no to most medical care outside trauma events. Hell, you might actually live longer!

I have been working on home remedies for many years now. Here are some of the remedies I make at home and use with my family. As I said before my family’s health has never been better. Our family does eat nourishing traditional foods. These remedies might not work with in your household but it’s a place to start for those interested in taking control of personal mental and physical health:

<div class=”d4p-bbp-quote-title”>74 wrote:</div>Obama said this was the final step required to complete his transformation of the country. So you know it is “the tool” that will be used to control the DNA of the US population.

Its been shown Obama was in collusion with the insurance companies to lie to congress and the american people. He should be an x President. The Republicans have promised to defund Obamacare. If they don’t they are as evil as Obama.

Hey if you want to be tortured, shot by a cop, killed by health care – Come to Amerika.

The Clintons started this whole push for the government’s involvement in healthcare. What we are experiencing now is just the Dem’s desired progression towards complete population control and enslavement. Not like they didn’t like it back in the 1800’s…. Same party…..

Not to get off track here but to follow c’s comments about doctors, I learned a lesson the hard way years ago when one of my brothers had cancer. At age 46 he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. They couldn’t define what kind of cancer it was, apparently something that back then was the case about 15% of the time, One of my mother’s friends, a nurse, told me he needed a medical advocate. I didn’t understand why that would be given he was at one of the top hospitals in Florida. Surely they would dig deep to solve the mystery as to what he had and pursue all of the available options. Nope. No further analysis or testing to see if the cancer was anywhere else, just intense radiation therapy on his head which failed, and a message to get his affairs in order. He was then back with only his primary care physician, He develops back pain and gets referred to a specialist who discovers cancer in his bones, again with no testing or analysis of what else might be going on. Only looking to treat the bone cancer. He develops additional symptoms and gets sent to another specialist who finds the cancer is in his liver and is going to start treatment for that, again with no plan to look at him in his totality. He died before the back and liver doctors could really get any treatment going. None of the doctors involved ever focused on anything but their one specialty, nor did any of them coordinate with each other. It was as if they saw their particular issue as the only problem he had. All of this occurred across a 6 month period. Our family friend nurse was right, but I was ignorant at the time as to understanding where she was coming from. I vowed never again to just blindly trust doctors.

Fast forward a few years and I am diagnosed with bladder cancer just prior to turning 52. My primary care physician is going to send me to a local urologist and I say no, I want to go to an oncology urologist in Boston and to find me one. He makes a recommendation and after researching him I say yes. He was head of urology at one of the major hospitals, taught at Harvard Medical School, and was the one of the country’s primary bladder cancer researchers. It proved to be a good thing because it turned out that I had a rare and very aggressive kind of bladder cancer, the highest grade. After my surgery to remove the tumors (fortunately my bladder was saved) he followed up with additional biopsies and ordered a year’s worth of very aggressive treatments to make sure it was totally killed off. He also ordered additional tests to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread anywhere else, and as part of my ongoing monitoring which will go on for the rest of my life, he periodically will do full scans of my abdomen to make sure nothing else is going on. It might have turned out differently had I just deferred to the primary care physician’s initial referral to a local urologist.